Methodism: Crowdsourcing before it was cool

Methodism has been crowdsourcing theology, social justice, accountability, and listening to the Holy Spirit since before it was cool.

Bad: A Vote By the People?

If I want to find a good place to eat, a dry cleaner, a gay-friendly church in a far-off town for a friend, or an esoteric United Methodist fact, I don’t Google for recommendations anymore. I don’t rely on the professional Zagat rating, the Better Business Bureau, or that a church has “we welcome everyone” on their website.

Instead, I post an update to Facebook with the title “Crowdsourcing” and the question. It’s not objective search results that matter to me: what matters more to me are the recommendations and evaluations by my close friends and online contacts.

I thought of this practice today as I was forwarded a tweet by a fellow United Methodist clergyperson that said:

As I read it, I thought “What’s the problem? Methodists do believe that, because we’ve been crowdsourcing for the Holy Spirit’s lead since our beginning.”

Crowdsourcing Theology

Methodists have been crowdsourcing theology since before it was cool.

In May 2016, I was invited to speak at a gathering of progressive Methodists in Houston, Texas. The morning before, I had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Darryl Stephens present a speech on his new book Methodist Morals. During the speech, he shared a fascinating line:

In Methodism, we don’t have a magisterium of Christian teaching. We just have each other.

In the Roman Catholic Church, their magisterium is the church’s office that establishes its own teachings, with the approval of the Pope. This central source allows for every decision and doctrine to be weighed against this central authority.

United Methodists, on the other hand, have no magisterium. We don’t have an office that creates “correct” doctrine. Instead, we create and vote on our doctrine at our every-four-years General Conference. Some doctrine is “higher” than others because of how difficult it is to change (simple majority, super-majority, insane super-majority, etc). But the vast majority of doctrine, while informed by the Bible, saints, apostles, martyrs, reason, tradition, and collective experience, is up to a vote. You mischaracterize Methodism if you deny this reality.

As I’ve shown in a systematic series below, authority to crowdsource theology comes from Jesus himself, and it is given to the Church to determine how to live out the Biblical record. Read more here:

Crowdsourcing Accountability

As well, Methodists have been crowdsourcing accountability since before it was cool.

Early Methodists were formed into class meetings and Wesleyan bands that “watched over one another in love.” This meant that they met together on a weekly basis in small groups and asked each other a set of questions. They didn’t do a scripted Bible Study, no Beth Moore, or memorize Wesley’s sermons. They talked to one another and asked “how is it with your soul” and other questions.

Accountability for Methodists was face-to-face and peer-based, not the system of disconnected complaints and vertical appeals to centralized authorities that we venerate as “The Covenant” today. Indeed, crowdsourcing accountability even today leads to creative and helpful solutions to Methodist problems.

Crowdsourcing Social Justice

Finally, Methodists have been crowdsourcing social justice since before it was cool.

It is popular in comments on Wesleyanism to differentiate between the terms “social holiness” and “social justice.” The claim is that Wesley’s term “social holiness” is not the same as social justice, because social holiness dealt with much of the accountability and support structures that have been mentioned in the previous section, and not a call to social justice.

Theology Everywhere, a weekly blog by the Methodist Church (UK), addresses this subject in an article by Roger Walton:

It is clear from the work of David Field that Wesley considered the outward expression and the sure sign of holiness to be ‘justice, mercy and truth’ and that ‘works of mercy’ were a means of grace. Summing up his careful analysis of Wesley’s writing on the relationship between justice and holiness, he states:

‘Works of mercy are a means through which God encounters and transforms people’s characters; they manifest a transformed character and through this manifestation they lead to further transformation. They are an expression of holiness and a means to become more holy.’

In other words, participating in the missio dei, including the struggle for a just society, takes us to many and various sites of social holiness where grace is readily available. It is in our participation, whether gathering for praise or campaigning against injustice, that we are formed by grace.

We see that social holiness leads to social justice. Watching over one another in love, seeking to love your neighbor, includes seeking to advocate against injustice they describe in their life. Social Justice–what Cornell West calls “love in public”–is a required component of social holiness, crowdsourced in small groups and large movements.

We must stop this Crowdsourcing!

We may not be crowdsourcing much longer.

The Pendulum has swung the other direction these days as segments of United Methodism seek to take authority away from the people and cement authority into faceless entities and lists of laws and creeds to be lived out in rote.

I get it. The Holy Spirit is unpredictable. Humans are messy. The different regions of Methodism yield different interpretations of Bible and Discipline, and our different mission fields have their own zones of accountability. And so it makes sense to want to replace Holy Spirit crowdsourcing with lists of laws and doctrinal litmus test Creeds which are predictable and can fill a page with so much text that the Holy Spirit cannot find a pixel to lay her head.

But we are Methodists. We do this crowdsourcing because of a powerful belief in the Holy Spirit. The entirety of the Wesleyan family tree of theology does. From Pentecostalism’s emphasis on the Spirit in worship, to the stuffy United Methodist system for corporate discernment, the Spirit reigns. And we must live into this tension rather than dismiss the people’s voice in favor of narrow interpretations of Christian tradition.

Your turn

My hope for my beloved United Methodism is that we do not cede our God-given authority away from messy human engagement of the Holy Spirit (which well describes the entirety of the Biblical narrative) and give that authority to the same type of lists, doctrines, practices, and purity codes that Jesus encountered from the Pharisees. The problem wasn’t the content of the doctrines: it was the enforcement and application of them devoid of compassion and without channels to challenge abuses of authority.

May we be better.

Thoughts?

Thanks for reading and your shares on social media. They are appreciated.

Comments

Jeremy, I find a wide field of agreement and disagreement with points you make.

I agree completely with your statements on “crowdsourcing accountibility”. It is one of our distinguishing marks that we have allowed to fade over time. We had the power to transform lives when we looked one another in the eye and said, “We can do better together.” I would love to see a revival of that “one anothering” that made us so successful as a movement.

I agree somewhat with your “crowdsourcing social justice”. I appreciate that you do not go so far as to say that social holiness and social justice are interchangeable phrases. You express it perfectly when you say that “social holiness leads to social justice”. There are too many who want to take it to either extreme – accountability for living right or transforming broken systems. Our heritage is one of both/and. My point of disagreement would only be in not acknowledging the misuse of that point of view.

The other point I somewhat agree on would be the points leading out of “crowdsourcing theology” and the links to other posts regarding the Church’s authority to determine sin. I am not disagreeing out of theological position. My point of disagreement is only out of my own working through this issue. I need to read those posts in more depth. I am currently preaching a series on sin and may end up agreeing with you a lot more by the end of it.

My major point of disagreement is really with the overall theme of “crowdsourcing theology”, and it may not be a disagreement on what you are saying, as much as a disagreement of reference point. I have stated before that I tend to anchor myself in historic Wesleyan tradition. From that reference point I would say that we (United Methodists) have not been crowdsourcing theology from the beginning. Methodists didn’t come together to determine how we should thing/believe together. Wesley laid out how Methodists would move forward. It wasn’t as much about systematic theology, but how theology was lived out. That allowed for people of Anglican and Presbyterian and Anabaptist and other Christian points of view to be Methodist.

It isn’t until we become a church and move away from Wesley’s writings that we began to crowdsource our theology. And I refer only to the American experience. I am not sure how the British Methodists moved away from the primary material Wesley laid out.

And we are going to disagree somewhat over what our “official” doctrine is. And that is okay, I have room for that in my soul.

But good stuff. Thanks for the read and room for heavy thinking this morning.

Got it. Vox populi is the very mind and will and voice of God. As the crowd thinks, wills and speaks… so God thinks, wills and speaks as long as what is thought, willed or said affirms the social/political agenda that is the litmus test imposed by left-wing liberalism. Got it.

“But we are Methodists. We do this crowdsourcing because of a powerful belief in the Holy Spirit. The entirety of the Wesleyan family tree of theology does. From Pentecostalism’s emphasis on the Spirit in worship, to the stuffy United Methodist system for corporate discernment, the Spirit reigns. And we must live into this tension rather than dismiss the people’s voice in favor of narrow interpretations of Christian tradition.”

If you believe that the Spirit reigns in our “system for corporate discernment”, then why do you fight so hard against the answer that every General Conference has come up with since 1972 re the practice of homosexuality? It does speak the truth in that homosexual relations have been incompatible with 2000 years of Christian teaching, and if you delve into our Jewish roots it goes much farther than that. From everything I have read over the past 4 or 5 years, there is absolutely no record of Christianity trying to embrace same gender sexual relationships as being ordained by God. To accept a different understanding means we have to lay claim that we in the here and now have evolved into some new enlightenment–I don’t buy it. And currently in America, there are churches that still maintain a traditional belief as to marriage who are not suffering the consistent decline the UMC currently is. Check out the Wesleyan Church and the Anglican Church of North America. Furthermore, if you think John Wesley was into “crowdsourcing”, then I suggest you do some more studying; Wesley very much controlled what was taught in the societies and what was taught was anchored in 1700 years of Christian orthodoxy. And yes, social holiness could lead to social justice, but they are still two different things and Wesley never advocated for social justice in the absence of social holiness in the form of class meetings and other gatherings of the Methodist Societies. And finally, if the Western Jurisdiction is doing so well with their crowdsourcing, why is it declining at a faster rate than the denomination as a whole? Check out this response by a Western Jurisdiction United Methodist to the election of Karen Oliveto:

“We live in the Western jurisdiction and my husband is a UM elder, having recently stepped away from parish ministry. We are so tired of the shenanigans of the UMC, so sorely disappointed in the UM churches in our community that we now attend an Anglican Church. We are about the oldest congregants (61 years old) and marvel that so many young people are finding their way to a highly liturgical communtiy of worshippers. We love the orthodoxy of the ACNA and the vibrancy of this local church! ”